Due to recent advances in technology, computer users are now able to enjoy many features that provide an improved user experience, such as playing various media and multimedia content on their personal or laptop computers. For example, most computers today are able to play compact discs (CDs) so users can listen to their favorite musical artists while working on their computers. Many computers are also equipped with digital versatile disc (DVD) drives enabling users to watch movies.
In some multimedia environments, a computer has access to a computer-readable medium storing compressed media files such as Moving Picture Experts Group audio layer-3 (MP3) files and WINDOWS MEDIA technologies audio (WMA) files. When the media files are rendered on a computer, the computer typically has access to a database storing metadata describing albums, artists, genres, years, or the like for the media files. The computer typically organizes the media files into playlists based on the metadata when the compressed media files are played on the computer. For example, in the case of audio media files, the files may be organized by album, artist, genre, year, or some user specified selection and ordering. This allows users to easily have access to all of their content regardless of whether or not the users manually created a playlist.
However, when compressed media files are transferred from the computer to an optical format such as CD or DVD for playback on a portable CD player, DVD player or other consumer electronic devices having a low-power processor, limited memory and often limited display and user input capabilities, the media files traditionally lose much of the functionality offered by metadata databases hosted on devices with greater computing power. For example, while a first device may be able to render a playlist authored by a second device, the first device may not be able to identify the type of the playlist. In one example, the first device may generically identify as “Playlist 1” an “All Songs by Genre” playlist created by the second device, possibly due to an inability by the first device to interpret the headers of the playlist generated by the second device. Some existing systems lack a mechanism for interpreting the intent of a playlist and identifying playlists to all playback devices.
Some existing systems also lack a mechanism for marking or identifying outdated playlists. For example, a user may add or delete content, but a playback device with limited processing and/or memory capability may not be able to update any of the playlists or identify an outdated playlist to another device.
Accordingly, a system for creating standardized playlists and maintaining coherency on multiple authoring devices is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.